What’s Coming up on the Horizon for Enterprise Social Software?

For many, social enterprise software is a fairly new technology; however, its fast market adoption requires that the latest technologies and features be incorporated to meet users’ demands. Social technologies are becoming critical for enterprises as they are changing how they access knowledge. For this reason, there is an increasing need to improve collaboration across all areas of the enterprise both internally, among employees, and externally, with customers and partners.

In this blog, I want to share my thoughts and vision on what I see coming up on the horizon for enterprise social software, which will help companies drive better business results by providing high-value technology that increase their competitive positioning.

Here are a few of the technologies that will continue to drive value for enterprise social technologies:

Social Analytics: It will bring deeper insights into social networking data and correlation between users’ behavior and performance that can help companies better train employees for higher performance and leadership. Social analytics needs to focus on making sense out of the noise, and it is important to fine tune and further enhance the recommendation engine to better personalize a social workspace by recommending the right content, people or groups that are most relevant to users.

Social Knowledge: Knowledge is at the core of social collaboration and bringing people to the right knowledge faster and more accurately is the key to social collaboration. We have seen the transformation of knowledge from a command and control (KM) approach, to crowd-sourcing (Wiki), to community (forums/collaboration). Moxie Software has one of the top knowledge base solutions in the industry that tightly integrates to our product suite, and I am excited to work with the team to make it the number one social knowledge base in the industry.

Driving the Social Graph through Integration: Adoption is key to building a strong community. Moxie Software features a comprehensive integration strategy for reaching into existing tools and systems of record to build and maintain the organizational social graph that provides value to adopters and incentives to increase adoption. It also delivers intermittent rewards to encourage enthusiasm and consistency, all for the purpose of creating and feeding a healthy community.

Customer Centricity: Internal collaboration has always been around internal projects, driving efficiencies, innovation, etc. Now, we are looking at ways to include the voice of the customer in these conversations. Having a footprint in the contact center with Customer Spaces gives us a unique opportunity to include the voice of the customer within the internal collaboration paradigm – a huge competitive advantage – as the focus is all about the customer.

The enterprise social networking software market is an exciting one, and enterprises want the best applications that bring people to knowledge faster than any other technology, and that can ensure performance and scalability in all areas to handle thousands of users.